I know there have a been a few threads about this, yet every response seems to assume that the trouble is some choice the player made with setting their fleet postures. I just want to ask: If you set the AI to a particular home base, set the range to system, set it to defensive, and then leave it on automated, is the AI supposed to be able to switch those fleets to attack posture, reassign their home base, and assign them an attack target? And is there any way to keep them from doing that without have to turn automation off?

Playing with the latest beta patch, fleet set to defensive posture, sector range, automated - keeps changing to attack posture and range anywhere - changing the engagement stance (e.g. to only when attacked) has no noticeable effect, fleets still change, usually within a matter of seconds to attack/anywhere.

My experience has been that fleets set in defensive postures cannot be automated. Like you have seen, as soon as they are automated the AI changes everything and off they go to parts unknown , for reasons unknown.

In defensive stances they are supposed to automatically engage invading ships within the engagement range you set: sort a "semi-automated" stance.

But they are very poor at this. They fall out of position with the planet they are supposed to be defending, they don't prioritize the most dangerous threats, they react slowly to threats and when they finally do react its often with only a minimal number of ships from the defending fleet.

As a result the defensive stances cannot be trusted and you end up having to micro-manage your colony defenses during any wars, especially against a powerful adversary. Gets very tedius and right now, it's sucking the enjoyment out of this game for me. Certainly hope the AI is upgraded in this area in the next release.

The AI will automatically set the fleets to certain postures. Even if it's not the postures I want. I don't remember this being an issue in the initial release (which was the last version I played). Funny enough, the fleets will act as their posture dictates. I had a cruiser TF go and bust up pirates attack targets within their engagement range; the problem is that I didn't want that task force operating in a defensive posture.

Is this an issue with the latest beta.I do not get this issue at all when I played.

I'm guessing this is related to the .12 beta. I haven't seen fleet stances changing, but I have noticed the AI is slow to react if it reacts at all now. The .10 beta at least seemed to react better, though I didn't have time to play in depth.

Speaking of fleet stances, can anyone get the attack target to work with attack stances? I right click ships, stations, bases, planets and it acts like I'm not trying to select a target. At war or not at war didn't matter, even pirates. Never managed to get the big red circle for attack area since the previous beta. Did it get broken somewhere, or am I just not doing it right?

This is a constant problem. I don't understand why even if automated, fleets won't do what you tell them to do. There should be an automation routine for fleets set to defense posture, that would solve this silliness.